Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  Then I remember opening my eyes in the car. Blood, glass, dirt, and leaves were everywhere. I could barely turn my head, and when I did I saw that my mother was unconscious, blood trickling from her mouth. Peter was muttering, confused. “Where are we?” he asked. “What’s going on?” I would remain conscious, covered in glass, for the hour and a half it took for the paramedics and firefighters to get through the traffic and hike from the road down the embankment. My body went into shock, shivering uncontrollably, but I felt no pain. They used the Jaws of Life to open the car roof like a tin of sardines. A helicopter landed in the middle of the freeway to take my parents away to USC Medical Center. An ambulance carried me to Queen of Angels Hospital, where I finally lost consciousness without knowing whether my mother and her husband were alive.

  When I woke up hours later, I had tubes coming out of several places in my body. My right arm had been shattered, my right index metacarpal severed, and my left hip fractured. Shards of glass had embedded themselves in my skin, under my nails. To this day I have a shard lingering in my right thumb. My mother and Peter, I soon found out, were alive. Peter had broken his leg in four places and his hip in two. My mother was hurt the worst. She had snapped five ribs and her sternum, as well as her left hand and right arm. She had been airlifted because the impact had squeezed her heart. Her body and her spirit have never recovered completely. She no longer drives on freeways. When I’m in town, she often chooses to sit in the backseat with my daughter, which I think makes her happy in more ways than one. When she does ride in the front seat, I can sense her anxiety. Even as I ease to a stop, I often see her hands clutch the dashboard and her foot jam an imaginary brake pedal.

  After my first surgery, I was left with the scar, thin and straight, on my right arm. I was so grateful for the use of my arm that I didn’t think much of it. The doctors suggested that it might even get thinner and less noticeable. Instead, over the three or so years after the accident, I developed a keloid and the scar transformed into the gnarly caterpillar that today creeps up my right arm. Perhaps I could’ve asked the doctor to cut on the underside of the arm instead, where the scar would have been hidden. But at the time, of course, I was in no state to make such aesthetics-based decisions.

  When we got out of the hospital, we recovered at home, each of us too injured to minister to the others. We had home health nurses who looked after us. My aunt Trudy visited frequently and helped tend to us. As we healed on the outside, we all struggled inside, in our own quiet ways. My struggle was one of faith. The accident alone didn’t bring this about. Just a couple of days before the crash, I had finished a long stay at City of Hope Hospital. My mother had wanted to give penance and perform a puja of thanks at a temple, and the nearest Hindu temple was in Malibu, fifty miles from our home.

  Several weeks earlier, I’d developed Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare and life-threatening condition caused by an adverse reaction to medication or to a virus. Ulcers and lesions attacked and scalded my eyes, mouth, and throat. I’d first gone to a local hospital, but even the electric ice bed they put me on couldn’t lower my fever. My mother slept in the hospital, slumped on a chair or in a free bed beside me—as she’s done every time I’ve been hospitalized since, even when I’ve begged her to leave—while doctors tried and failed to diagnose my illness. She was fierce, my mother, and refused to accept incompetence. After days, she hired a private ambulance, unhooked my IV bag from its hook, and led me out of there with the IV still tethered to my arm. She took me to City of Hope, where she worked. The ulcers and sores rendered me essentially blind and mute for three interminable weeks. I was in terrible pain. I could not swallow my own saliva and had to sleep sitting up. At five-foot-nine, I weighed ninety-eight pounds.

  From these events I took away a new suspicion of comfort and happiness, understanding they were impermanent and could be taken away at any time. My family and I were pretty secular, but I believed in God and took our Hindu rituals seriously. Exacting this kind of karma seemed cruel if there was a God. Hadn’t my mom’s life been hard enough? I experienced a bout of atheism. With adolescent self-importance, I wondered why God would allow all this to happen to a fourteen-year-old girl.

  When I was finally able to resume my normal life, I focused on making up the months of schoolwork I’d missed while in the hospital and then recovering at home. I was out until May, and even when I went back to school, I had grueling physical therapy to reeducate my arm three times a week before school started as it was frozen and immobile at a ninety-degree angle at my side. I tried to move forward. The scar, however, was there to remind me and everyone else of what had happened. It caught everyone’s eye, a ropy and gnarled raised keloid. And I could see the look of wonder and shock on other people’s faces when they met me for the first time after the accident. I thought it was ugly, and it embarrassed me to no end. I became very self-conscious about it. I wore long sleeves when I could. For those times when I couldn’t, I perfected a casual pose that hid the scar under my left hand and raised thumb when my arms were crossed. I had always stood out for my height and skin color. But now, all people seemed to notice was the scar.

  I overheard the pity-ridden compliments. “It’s such a shame,” people would say. “She was so pretty. She could have modeled.” Just months before the accident, when my mom was in the midst of a very eighties series of self-help seminars designed to release one’s inner child, I joined her for one of these sessions. That’s where we met a photographer, who asked my mother if he could take some pictures of me. Reluctantly, she agreed. A week later, she held the light reflector for him under the Santa Monica Pier. The photos were beautiful; even the brooding, angst-filled teenage me could see that. “Maybe I could be a model,” I said to my mother. “Sure,” she said, clearly disapproving. “Perhaps next summer, when school is over, you can show them to someone.” A year after the accident, we stumbled on those photos in a drawer. Now that I had a caterpillar of scarred skin crawling down my arm, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that any agency would be interested in such damaged goods. My mother, I felt, was secretly relieved.

  It angered me that people saw me as ruined. I hated the scar. It carried the weight of tragedy. Yet even then I also knew my scar was a symbol of my survival. The surgery that put it there had saved my arm. After a year of physical therapy, I was once again able to stir pasta, dance, throw a football, and, in countless other ways, be a normal American teenager.

  Later, in college, I would learn how to cover the scar with pancake makeup and powder. The director of a campus play I was in worried that my scar would be distracting, so someone in the theater department offered to help. Night after night, she covered the scar with stage makeup. Onstage, I was liberated. I felt like another person: not just a character but another me, one who didn’t have a scar. By the end of the run, I had learned to put the makeup on myself.

  After I revealed my secret to Josette, there was an interminable silence. I’m sure she registered my terror-stricken face. She glanced at my scar and then asked in English, “Have you seen a doctor about getting that removed?” Before I could answer, she waved away her own question with a dismissive “Bien, bien.” This was a first: someone, and a modeling agent at that, who didn’t care about my scar.

  Santiago brought me to Spanish Elle. They admitted me, looked him over with a who-the-hell-are-you glare, and told him he could go. He waited for me outside. I was led into a room filled with many closets’ worth of clothes hanging on garment racks. Editors snapped Polaroids of models, pinning the photos to a giant corkboard. The photos captured the models from the neck down only. There were no faces. We were fitting models, one step above clothes hangers. It was cold outside, but the clothes on the racks were sleeveless. The shoot was for a summer story.

  To the girls, who were from all over the world, the editors communicated in polite but abrupt English. “Here,” one said to me. “Put this on.” I took off my sweater and peeled off my leggings and socks. I was conscious of my
scar but even more embarrassed by my expired pedicure and my unshaven legs, stubbly and covered with ash, chalky against my brown skin. (Come on, who actually shaves their legs in the winter?) If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve at least stopped at a drugstore for some moisturizer. I stood there, shivering and mortified, as these arbiters of beauty got a close-up of a regular girl.

  Next to me another fitting model stood, awaiting her instructions. She was lithe and smooth with long, shiny blonde hair. She looked like she had just stepped out of a Breck Girls ad, her eyelashes curled, just a hint of makeup on her fair skin. She smiled when she saw me, a sunny, empty smile that revealed perfect white teeth.

  Among themselves, the editors spoke Spanish, which at this point I couldn’t speak a lick of. I had no clue what they thought of me. They smiled only after they’d dressed me, to admire their own handiwork. After a few hours of dressing, standing around, and undressing, the Breck Girl and I were dismissed. They told her to come back the next day. They thanked me for my time. At first, I shrugged off the rejection. This had all been too good to be true. I wasn’t model material anyway. I had a pretty face, but I figured my skin color and scar put me altogether out of the running.

  Still, part of me yearned to experience the glamour of modeling. But since it seemed impossible, I decided right then, full of delicious self-righteousness, to focus on higher things, like my education. I don’t want to risk lowering my GPA for some modeling job anyway, I told myself. I wanted to graduate with honors. But the rejection stung. It would have been better if I had never entered the offices of Elle, never gotten a glimpse of the world I was now being shut out of. To my mother and grandparents, education was the most important goal for a young woman. But my response was self-protective, too. It’s easy to scoff at a club that won’t have you as a member.

  Yet despite the certain-to-come embarrassments and rebuffs, something inside me had changed when Josette shrugged off my scar. Maybe it wasn’t the deal-breaker I’d imagined it was. And though I hadn’t been asked back to Elle, I did get a check two weeks later for twenty thousand pesetas (roughly two hundred dollars in 1992, if memory serves). In two hours, I had made enough to cover two weeks’ worth of living expenses. Where I came from, you couldn’t make that kind of money without a graduate degree and board exams. I thought about the degree I’d have in a few months—major in theater arts, minor in American literature. That piece of paper would have cost my family close to a hundred thousand dollars, more if you counted how much we would pay in interest after I settled my massive loans. All that money and I couldn’t envision what I’d be qualified for, other than temp work. So when the agency, despite my embarrassing first outing, decided to take me on, I was thrilled. Between classes, I’d go on casting calls and get the occasional job, thanks to the surprisingly supportive Josette. I was competing for jobs that paid a thousand dollars a day. All I had to do was stand there and suck in my stomach. All of a sudden, I wanted very badly to be a model.

  I sheepishly told my professors about my gig, and to my happy surprise, they encouraged my foray into Spanish professional life. They pointed out that being among Spaniards and having to interact in Spanish was great for my education. I enjoyed this new justification, so I left out the part about most of the other models being Swedish or German, most of the editors speaking impeccable English, and hardly any of them saying a word to me the whole time.

  For a while, I girded myself for the inevitable disappointment I imagined lurking around the next corner with an “I’m smarter than this anyway” shtick. That evaporated with my first big gig during Cibeles Madrid Fashion Week. No high-minded snobbery about being too smart for modeling could negate the fact I couldn’t even grasp simple directions. Sometimes I’ll leave acquaintances with the impression that I became an international sensation right away, because the truth makes me wince.

  At rehearsal, although I felt strange and shy parading around, scar or no scar, I was confident about the task at hand—the task being, well, walking. I was a sharp girl. I considered myself well read and articulate. Sure, these were the days before models just had to walk in a straight line. And sure, the instructions were given in rapid-fire Spanish. But following the simple choreography—synchronized entrances and exits, a few turns and crosses—should’ve been a cinch. And yet for some reason, when all the other girls walked right, I walked left. When they walked left, I walked right. After an hour or two of my screwing up, the choreographer said I could leave. Phew, I’m done rehearsing, I thought. I needed to recoup. I’d come back the next day and show them how it was done. Nope, I soon found out. I could leave, as in leave and not come back.

  When the semester ended, I left Madrid, returned to Worcester to walk for graduation, then moved back home to L.A. with boxes and boxes of stuff but no game plan. After my glamorous European stint, I was back living inside the peach-colored confines of my old bedroom, sleeping on my mattress-and-box-spring-on-the-floor bed beside a bookcase filled with Sophie’s Choice, The Outsiders, and The Satanic Verses, with its original red-bordered dust jacket.

  I knew little about the modeling industry in the U.S., though I had seen a woman featured on the local news whenever there was a segment on models, which in L.A. was quite a lot. Her name was Nina Blanchard. I scribbled that down, then called 411 for the number. When I reached the receptionist for the Nina Blanchard Agency, she informed me they held regular open calls. I told my mom. “That’s great, Paddy,” she said, ever my booster. “If you want to go, you should go.”

  The forty miles from my mother’s house in La Puente to Nina’s Beverly Hills office felt more like four thousand as I drove from my lower-middle-class suburb into mansion land. Clutching my slim portfolio and wearing a hideous dress with big white daisies, I walked right into the office and waited. After a young and smiling Frenchman named Philippe saw my photos, I met with Nina herself. This time I’d come prepared for my audition. I wore short sleeves to avoid the awkwardness of having to bring up the scar myself. And of course I shaved my legs.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Nina was the epitome of the iconic old-school Beverly Hills agent—the raspy voice, the Estée Lauder look, the commanding air. I always imagine her wearing a Chanel blazer with a big brooch. Nina, who passed away in 2010, was the Eileen Ford of the West Coast, the woman who made Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley, who launched the California blonde look. She was an institution.

  She warned me that I wasn’t in Europe anymore. My scar could be a serious obstacle. But she was willing to represent me. I couldn’t have been more astounded if she had sprouted gossamer wings and pulled out a magic wand. My journey had begun. Elated, I planned to return to the agency after a two-week trip to New York.

  Before my meeting with Nina, I had done a little homework and made ambitious plans to weasel my way into all the big modeling agencies in New York. I would be in the capital of advertising and fashion, roaming Madison and Seventh Avenues, so why not storm the offices of Eileen Ford, John Casablancas, and Wilhelmina? Nina advised me not to. I wasn’t ready, she told me. I obeyed. In those days, you had a “mother” agency who groomed you and helped you build your modeling book of tear sheets from magazine editorials, and then that agency sent you to other markets they thought you could work in. They placed you at a sister agency and shared the commission.

  When I returned from the East Coast, I set off on a Friday for a meeting at Nina’s agency, this time with proud mom in tow, to meet the rest of the team and receive my marching orders. Nina wasn’t there that day, but her head of fashion, Jack somebody, was.

  He explained gingerly that my scar was not exactly a draw for editors and casting directors. “We have to think of our bottom line,” he said, as my elation faded and dejection replaced it. Eleven minutes into my big meeting, I was headed back to the San Gabriel Valley. My mom was livid. “That scar is not your fault,” she said, with tears in her eyes. But any anger I might have felt took a backseat to my sense that modeling in Spain ha
d all been a fairy tale. I couldn’t blame a modeling agency for being superficial. That was their business. All I understood was that in Spain, I was a woman, beautiful and confident. Back home, I was a young girl again, uneasy with herself, scarred, and brown.

  I wallowed all weekend; then on Monday, as soon as I knew her office was open, I called Nina and explained what had happened. She said that she would keep her word, as I had kept mine while in the Big Apple. Nina fought with Jack. She was the owner, after all, and she ultimately took me on.

  I wasn’t expecting to be on the cover of Vogue, but I’m not sure I understood that the jobs I’d get would be commercials. My first job was a Folgers commercial, shot in L.A. but for the French market. I played one of several coffee groupies, wild for a caffeine-drinkin’ man. For most of the day I sat around and chatted with the other models. They regaled me with stories. One had just done a video with Prince. Another went on about modeling in Europe—not “second-tier Europe,” as she condescendingly referred to Madrid, but in Paris and Milan. How fabulous it all seemed! After three days of essentially lounging around, I left with a really cool pair of jeans from the shoot and $3,600—cash. I had never seen so much at once. I folded up the bills and crammed the wad into my front pocket. One girl looked at the bulge with an eyebrow raised. “Why don’t you put it in your purse?” she asked. “Because I want it close to me,” I said. I liked the feel of it against my thigh.

  Nina was a motherly presence in my life. When jobs or castings ended late, she’d insist that I stay the night in the spare room at her lavish Mission Revival–style villa in the Hollywood hills. She didn’t want me driving home late. I’d never seen a house like hers. I ogled the Spanish tile, the turrets, and the spiral staircase. Her stunning lawn had no curry leaf or kumquat trees, like my mom’s, but I remember taking note of the St. Augustine grass. Peter had had a gardening business when he first arrived in the U.S. and St. Augustine grass, he always said, was the most resilient.